Please refer to interviews with Philip Roth on YouTube for more information on his approach to his work. I've posted this one about another novel because it's short and gives us a glimpse into his writing process. He wrote a page a day and often struggled with just one sentence. Regardless of how long writers spend on the stories they create, once the actor is challenged to perform the character created by the writer, it's the actor's obligation to understand that they're collaborating with the writer; that they bring their life experience to the to the life experience of the writer and that the character on the page becomes the third entity between them in performance. The challenge for the actor is to make each written word from the writer sacred in the process of building the portrait of the character.
From the novel, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA: "It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for me far more than religion. Nobody in the neighborhood had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap either outdoors or in the houses I routinely floated through with my boyhood friends. The adults were no longer observant in the outward, recognizable ways, if they were seriously observant at all, and aside from older shopkeepers like the tailor and the kosher butcher....hardly anyone in the vicinity spoke with an accent. By 1940 Jewish parents and their children at the southwestern corner of New Jersey's largest city talked to one another in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson by our Jewish counterparts in the five boroughs."
What was the purpose of the following scene that depicts the family's observance of the Sabbath and explicitly indicates that it was observed every Friday night? Aside from making Philip's lack of knowledge about the orthodox men who came to the door asking for donations nonsensical, it directly contradicted the novel's description of the family's secular lifestyle, and made Evelyn's remark to Rabbi Bengelsdorf (discussed in the Episode 1 post) puzzling regarding how non-observant her family was. It may seem minor to some, but please note the facile decision to speak in a cliche semblance of a New York twang instead of the accent clearly defined by Roth. One need only listen to his accent above, even after living many years in London, and notice that over a lifetime it remained the same -- in case one didn't know how American English was spoken in Altoona in 1940! The accents in performance weren't consistent, but the affect on the creation of character resulted in cliches that often lead to caricatures, to stereotypes, particularly by the women. Funny; from the beginning of his career, Roth was often accused of being anti-Semitic; a "self-hating Jew." I'm not an avid reader of Roth; I've read a few of his novels, some I enjoyed; others not so much even though I admired his talent. It seemed to me that he created complex, neurotic men and women who were products of, and in conflict with, their social environment -- that is, their central conflict was with the society, the particular social context in which they lived. If an adaptation of his work doesn't rigorously adhere to it, even down to the way his characters pronounce words, then it runs the risk of expressing the anti-Semitism of which Roth was so unfairly accused.
Did the cast notice omissions and contradictions in the script from the novel; details that were painstakingly crafted by Roth to depict the social environment? Did they consider the result of omissions and contradictions that would affect their ability to create the characters in the novel? If they did, what did they do about it?
